About Me

Thursday, January 3, 2013

One Word For 2013: HEART

I've seen this "one word" movement across a variety of blogs, Facebook, etc. and thought I'd give it a go. After spending several days pondering it, I found that I kept coming back to the word, "HEART." For me, this word is a boiled down representation of a YouTube video that I have watched repeatedly as of late. If you want to find it, you can do a quick search on "Death Crawl" on YouTube--you'll see several posted. I prefer the longer version (approx. 6-7 minutes) to get the full context. It is is a scene from a movie (I don't know the name of the movie and haven't seen it). In this scene a football coach is trying to teach his team captain, and the rest of the team, a lesson about having the right attitude and doing your best. I won't describe the entire scene, but will share the parts that get me misty-eyed each time I watch it.

As the team captain is getting tired, he starts complaining (yelling in agony) that it burns. The coach yells back, "Let it burn!" As the team captain keeps complaining, the coach keeps overcoming his objections and keeps motivating him to keep going. "Don't quit!" Keep driving!" "Your best! Give me your very best!" And at one point when the team captain says he can't do it any more, the coach yells, "It's all HEART from here."

This scene is very moving and really speaks to me on so many levels. I use this to remind myself to "Let it burn!" And to tell myself, "It's all HEART from here!" so I can then continue to give my very best and just keep going.

This was my first attempt at making this kind of journal. Usually I work in an altered-book or use loose sheets of paper, card stock, etc. that I later hole punch and connect with rings into a finished journal. I didn't want to go out and buy all of the materials and instead I challenged myself to use only what I had available in my art studio or around my house. Here are the materials I used:
-Large sheet of handmade paper that I had purchased over a year ago but had never used (used in place of primed canvas for the cover)
-Heavy cardstock dinner menus and used art paper-got these at SCRAP in San Francisco (used in place of water color paper)
-vintage rick rack ribbon-got a box of ribbon-y goodness from my sister-in-law a while ago (used in place of twine)
Tools I used:
-Scissors (used in place of bone folder - don't have one of those)
-Meat thermometer to make nice big holes (used in place of an awl - don't have one of those)

I plan to incorporate a lot of collage elements into this journal and hope it'll be twice as thick as it now. To accomodate that, I kept the individual signatures rather far apart, didn't glue down the last page (in case I want to add another signature later to the back), left the part that flaps over long, and didn't affix the long pieces to wrap around the journal as I will do that a little later. I think I did a pretty good job for my first time. It was a lot easier than I had previously thought it would be. I've added a couple photos of my new journal and the inside front cover (detailing my one word for 2013: HEART) on my Flickr. You can find them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/feliciaborges

Once I had decided on the word HEART, it was amazing to me how many different images, words, events, etc. brought this word back to me again and again over the last few days. Most importantly, my 82-year-old grandmother had HEART surgery just this past week. (She's doing great!).